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County Carlow · Leinster

Bagenalstown

Muine Bheag

the Irish name means 'little thicket'; the English name is for the Bagenal family

🏔 County Carlow Source: Wikipedia ↗
The story

A town with two names that do not translate each other. Walter Bagenal laid it out on the Barrow in the 18th century and meant to build a second Versailles, which is why it was to be called New Versailles; the road went elsewhere and the plan died with it. Muine Bheag is the official name, and almost everyone says Bagenalstown.

County Carlow through the ages →
The history of Bagenalstown

St Lappan reputedly founded a monastic school at Donore outside the town in the 8th century. In the 18th century there was only a hamlet here, at Muine Bheag, the small thicket, when Walter Bagenal planned a town modelled on Versailles; the Dublin coach road was moved to cross the Barrow at Leighlinbridge instead, and he gave up with only the courthouse built. The mills — Rudkin's and Lodge Mills — and the Barrow Navigation made it a busy post, boat and market town, but it grew into a real town only when the railway came in 1846.

In 1911 it became the first town in Ireland with street signs in two languages. After 1922 the town commissioners renamed it Muine Bheag; locals kept calling it Bagenalstown, and in 1975 77% of those who voted chose to change the name back, but the vote failed for lack of turnout.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Bagenalstown ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Castles and monuments within 15 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

Worth seeing nearby
  • Browneshill dolmen · A capstone of some 100 tonnes, the heaviest in Europe, raised by farmers without wheels or metal. Nobody is sure how.
  • St Mullin’s · Moling founded this in the early 7th century and is said to have dug the mill race himself. The Book of Mulling, written here in the 8th century, carries the earliest known plan of an Irish monastery — four crosses inside the wall and eight outside.
  • Dunmore Cave · Where the annals say Vikings massacred a thousand people in 928. Bones of women and children were found inside in 1973 — and a Viking silver hoard in 1999.
  • Kilkenny — the burning of Petronilla · Bishop Ledrede accused the moneylender Alice Kyteler of feeding a demon and killing four husbands. Kyteler slipped away. Her maid Petronilla de Meath, tortured into confessing, was flogged and burned on 3 November 1324 — the first such burning in Ireland, and it fell on the servant.
  • St Mullin’s — the death of Mad Sweeney · Cursed by Rónán to wander as a bird-man and to die by a spear, Suibhne ends here in Moling’s care, drinking milk from a hollow in cow dung. Moling’s herdsman, believing a rumour about him, put the spear in — and the curse was complete.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.

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